September 23–30, 1999

movies

Pouty White Girls

The power of the pout in American Beauty and Best Laid Plans.

by Cindy Fuchs

Forget nice girls. Pouty girls are where it’s at. The primary appeal of these characters is their faces, at once soft and harsh. Battered by life — or at least believing that they are — pouty girls combine cunning and vulnerability, pain and desire. They’re impatient, funny and voluptuous; their cleverness makes them sympathetic, even as their cruelty makes them scary.

It would seem that poutiness runs counter to the current popularity of Katie Holmes and ex-trash-queen Drew Barrymore, not to mention sugar-diva Britney Spears (though I see traces of pouts in her performances). Still, I see a trend building. You might call it the Christina Ricci Effect. When Ricci first appeared as Wednesday Addams, brooding and weird, the movies’ idea of marketable girls began to change. A perverse antidote to the way-too-wholesome Molly Ringwald, Ricci made cynicism and petulance seem quite delightful. Today Ricci’s grown up, and her bitchy kewpie-dollness is all the rage, refined in her own work (The Ice Storm, Buffalo 66, The Opposite of Sex) and emulated by Alyssa Milano, Michelle Williams (on Dawson’s Creek, not in Dick) and Rose McGowan — as well as people you wouldn’t expect, like Anna Paquin in Hurlyburly, Angelina Jolie in Foxfire, Sarah Michelle Gellar in Cruel Intentions.

It’s tempting to say that pouty white girls are less committed or maybe less self-aware than the infamous angry white girls of a few years back (most loudly, Courtney Love, Liz Phair, PJ Harvey or Kathleen Hanna). But I think this new version of girls’ resistance can actually be more subtle than "Suck my left one!" (as anthemic and brilliant as Hanna’s assault on masculine privilege was). Poutiness also suggests that this new generation (half-generation?) has learned something from their predecessors. Ricci, Williams, McGowan et. al. express the frustration and self-knowledge that most girls seem to possess nowadays: Conscious of themselves as objects as well as much-targeted consumers — and not exactly happy about it — they’re fighting back by manipulating systems to get what they want.

Consider two new movies featuring pouty girls, the much-praised American Beauty and the much-derided Best Laid Plans. Both highlight the charms of pretty girls who are also experts at sulking, rebelling and getting revenge. No matter what happens around them — and they are immersed in chaos — these girls are focused, conscientious and astute observers of their worlds, which are populated with selfish, damaged or otherwise odious characters.

Mike Barker’s noirish Best Laid Plans stars Reese Witherspoon, one of the great pouters of our time. Whether playing the extra-nice virgin in Cruel Intentions or the overachieving perky vixen in Election, she’s got a fabulous (sometimes ferocious, sometimes tremulous) chin-out look that she uses often and well. Here she plays a girlfriend, hardly a great part, but it’s her face that makes any of this movie hold together. We first meet Nick (Alessandro Nivola) as he’s partying with his big-mouthed college buddy Bryce (Josh Brolin). A beautiful girl clearly looking for — or like — trouble (Witherspoon) walks by their seedy-bar booth, and before you know it, she’s hooked up with Bryce and Nick is on his way home, leaving the couple alone. Cut to the credits. Cut to entwined hands in mid-sex act.

	Best Laid Plans’ Reese Witherspoon (with Alessandro Nivola)

Sometime later that night, Bryce calls Nick, terrified and incoherent — "I’m in big fucking shit!" — because the girl has accused him of rape. In a panic, he’s hit her and tied her up in the basement. The film then indulges in some heavy-duty symbolism suitable for its Southern California setting: On his way to Bryce’s, Nick drives by a brushfire and firemen doing battle. They wave him on into the night. At his destination, Nick checks on the girl (her name seems to be Katey). She is bruised and bloodied, her mouth is gagged, her tears have bedraggled her mascara. Nick observes, "The situation is not very good."

No shit. But it soon becomes clear that Nick’s relationship with the girl (her real name is Lissa) is not what it seems to be. While the dialogue at this point revolves around whether or not Katey-or-Lissa is "hurt," Witherspoon’s beat-up face and several subsequent flashback scenes (dating back four months) suggest that her pain is much deeper than could be caused by some lughead hitting her. But the film never gets beyond this superficial treatment of the girl’s pain — or anyone else’s for that matter. Instead, it relies on capers and sly plot twists, with an emphasis on your increasing distrust of what you’re seeing.

The focus of your distrust is Nick, whose motives appear to make him as heartless as he is wifty-looking. And the only reason you go along with any of this silliness is Lissa (and yes, Witherspoon’s evocative, intelligent, yearning, pouty face is crucial for this development). Most disappointing is the fact that the movie relies on the unimaginative premise that the specter of an abused girl — raped, punched, used as bait for a deadly and ill-conceived scam — stands in for the hero’s emotional development. If she lives and forgives him, the movie has it, he learns his lesson and you can leave feeling all right.

It’s a trickier business to leave American Beauty feeling all right, but the film works very hard to make that possible, despite its dismal representation of suburban living. Scripted by first-time screenwriter Alan Ball (who used to write for Cybill and off-Broadway) and directed by British theater veteran Sam Mendes (Cabaret, The Blue Room), the film features Thora Birch, once Harrison Ford’s school-uniformed daughter in the Tom Clancy movies, now a really pissed-off teen named Jane, living in the generic ’burbs with her hateful and self-hating parents, Lester (Kevin Spacey) and Carolyn (Annette Bening). The poor kid doesn’t have a chance. She’s a morose cheerleader with pale skin and red-red lipstick, as well as a blond, burstingly beautiful best friend, Angela (Mena Suvari, the golden girl of American Pie), also on the squad, who absorbs all attention whenever they’re in the same space.

Birch is absolutely brilliant. Her sophisticated performance of Jane’s despair and aspirations — to be like Angela, to be loved by her father or someone resembling him, to be anywhere but where she is, in a room where her mother is melting down before her eyes — save American Beauty from comic, surreal overkill. She anchors the film’s easy-target hysterics in a character whose face — more than any dialogue or situation — registers the dark nuances of adolescent fear, disgust and longing.

However, most critical attention has been centered on the movie’s insights into Lester’s horrific existence. This is understandable, as he is the narrator. Right off the bat he tells us, "This is my life. In less than a year, I’ll be dead. Of course, I don’t know that yet. In a way I’m dead already." The language is brutal and lyrical. The scene beneath the voiceover is alarmingly sterile but extremely familiar: an overhead shot of a suburban neighborhood, all the houses alike, all the streets going nowhere. In an instant, he’s sympathetic, the heart of the film. You anticipate and dread his death, and wonder who will be responsible.

You’re led to believe that it’s Jane, indirectly or otherwise. The very first shot in the film is her face, on video, pouting. She’s talking to whoever holds the camera, whom we learn later is her boyfriend, a strange, desperate and abused new neighbor named Ricky (Wes Bentley). He affords his elaborate entertainment system by selling pot (to her dad) but he spends most of his time videotaping everyone, in particular Jane at all hours, from any position he can manage, as she crosses her lawn, gossips in the schoolyard, passes by her bedroom window. In this first scene, she talks about how unhappy she is, and how much she dislikes Lester. "I need a father who’s a role model," she says. "Someone should put him out of his misery." Off camera, Ricky offers to kill him for her.

This offer is certainly foreboding, especially since it’s followed by Lester’s announcement of his imminent demise. As the action proceeds, Jane is revealed as being typically teenagerish in her wrath: that is, not convinced that what she thinks she wants is really what she wants. (Angela says that the worst thing is to be "ordinary," and Jane believes her for most of the film, also accepting Angela’s plainly unfounded judgment that she — Jane — is ordinary.) She’s also passive and fearful, despite her desperation, characteristics she’s absorbed from Lester and Carolyn (who sells real estate badly and has an affair with the local "real estate king," played by Peter Gallagher). But Ricky, he’s another story: a ticking time bomb, embodying the stereotype that suburban white boys are fast becoming in today’s mass-media eye. His backstory includes a pathologically passive mom (Allison Janney) and a menacing dad, Marine Colonel Frank Fitts (Chris Cooper, devastating in a truly troubling role).

Fitts’ salient traits are ruthlessness, rigidity and homophobia — the ’90s insta-signs of imminent suburban-guy breakdown — which definitively set him apart from Lester, who genuinely likes his gay neighbors and who becomes remarkably flexible once he loses his advertising job and falls in love with Angela. This latter development comes to resembles Lolita, in that Angela relishes her role as jailbait, misunderstanding it as a means to self-worth (a typical girl’s mistake, hardly pathological in her given environment). Lester’s redemption takes up the movie’s length and emotional focus, but he leaves walking disasters in his wake: most obviously, his undone wife and guilt-traumatized child.

By the time these results become clear to you, the film will be over. It ends, as it promises in its opening frames, with Lester’s death. The face that will haunt you is Jane’s, as it haunts her father, her boyfriend and her mother. Mopey and dreamy, implacable and lovely, Jane, like Lissa, wants more than she can imagine. If only the movies around them were so ambitious.

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